Balancing of Flexible Rotors Based on Accelerating Unbalance Response without Trial Weights

Traditional flexible rotor steady-state balancing methods expose many disadvantages such as complex operations and low efficiency. Based on rotor transient unbalance response during accelerating process, flexible rotor is balanced in this paper using the genetic algorithm to identify the initial mass unbalance. The identification strategy is to minimize the difference between calculated transient response from the appropriately established finite element model and measured data in which the magnitudes and angels of initial unbalance are regarded as design variables. Without adding trial weights, the proposed method requires much less data measuring. To verify the feasibility of this method, a double disk rotor balancing test was carried out on Bently RK4 test rig after model verification of the finite element model using model updating techniques. The transient vibration deflections of the two disks are significantly reduced after balancing. Experimental results show that the method can identify the unbalance of a flexible rotor accurately and efficiently.